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18 out of 18 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Quite a notebook"
Pros: 17" Screen, Full Size Keyboard, TV Tuner, Ports, Ports, and More Ports
Cons: Battery Life
Summary: I have read about all the reviews that people have posted here and I came to one conclusion, most all the negative feedback displayed here has to do more with HP's service rather than the product. Now I have owned two Gateway laptops and a Dell Pocket PC, and I must say that their service had their moments too. But that did not take away or add too the quality of their products.
Like most, I had to wait a really long time (a little over a month) for my notebook. But I figured with the money I saved by customizing my notebook, it was well worth the wait. The notebook I customized is almost the caliber of the zd8080us. Noticeable downgrades to my system was 1GB of ram scaled down to 512MB, and the P4 I choose was the 3.2GHZ over the 3.4GHZ. But the noticeable upgrades on the model I customized was screen resolution (1680 X 1050 as opposed to 1440 x 900) and the 5400RPM 100GB hard drive instead of the 4200RPM drive on the 8080. My customized laptop was just a few pennies over 2000, while an 8080 would have run me $2400 to $2600 depending on where I purchased it.
Now to the meat of the review. I have had the laptop a little over a week now, and I have to say that I love it. Now I know people have complained about the weight, the heat, and the battery life, but I will be quite honest....I only feel that the real gripe here is the battery life. I mean, I don't think that HP has ever tried to hide the fact that this thing is heavy, so if you want a notebook to lug around airports, then this one may not be the one for you. I carry my notebook everyday from work to the car, then the car to my apartment...no big deal. And as far as the heat goes, the old dinosaur notebook I upgraded from was a Gateway Solo 5350 with a 650MHZ PIII, and it gets much hotter than this notebook. But the most I have been able to squeeze out of the battery was about an hour and a half, that was just surfing the web. I played Halo on it about 30 minutes on a full charge, and the battery had about 50% charge left on it when I was through.
When I purchased this laptop, I wanted one that I could work and play on. I have run Unreal Tournament and Halo on it so far with no slowdown at all, even with programs running in the background. I hope to get a couple new games (hopefully Half-life 2 and Far Cry) to really push the card and see what it will do. I have a friend that has a 6 month old Alienware Area 51 notebook and this HP seems to run similar games a little faster than his. And I didn't have to pay $3500 for my notebook
And then there is the screen, there is only one word to describe it - BEAUTIFUL. That is the first thing that people at work notice when they walk into my office. It is a breath of fresh air to look at this screen when you compare it to my old notebook.
The Windows XP Media Center Edition seems to work flawlessly, but to be quite honest, I have only scratched the surface of what all the Media Center Edition can do. It would have been nice if HP would have put a DVI port on the external tuner.
All in all, I am very pleased with this notebook. I feel that it will be a while before I will have to upgrade again because I was able to get such a great notebook at such a great price. Notebooks I considered before deciding on this one: Dell XPS (too pricey), Dell 9200 (still too pricey), Toshiba Satellite P35-S629 (128MB ATI 9700 was the largest video card) and the Alienware Area 51 (too pricey still).
- 1 reply to this review
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I bought my zd8000 from BestBuy, and plugged it in to my 220 VAC outlet in Spain, no problem. It worked with internet for a week, until it could no longer resolve the DNS address. I had to remove Norton and reinstall the whole software and input DNS by hand.
A big surprise was that the TV receiver is for NTSC only! A laptop is for travel, only one country uses NTSC, multi-system tuners are commonplace. So audio-video work is not possible with this otherwise great machine. Now I'm trying to find a multi-system tuner, one that works with the (aggravating) Windows Media Center software, or somehow with this machine. Any hints? I want to put all my vinyl and cassettets on HD.
